“So what do I do with the sumbitch, Colonel?” one of the Louisiana cavalrymen guarding Starbuck asked.
Evans had been frowning toward the mist of smoke that hung above the stone bridge. He turned bad-temperedly back to announce his decision about Starbuck, but was interrupted before he could speak. “A message, sir.” The speaker was the lieutenant who had accompanied Evans on his abortive visit to Faulconer’s tent that morning. The lieutenant was mounted on a gaunt gray horse and carried a pair of field glasses with which he had been watching the semaphore station on the hill. “From the wig-wag, sir. Our left is turned.” The lieutenant spoke without a trace of emotion.
There was a moment’s stillness as one of the enemy’s monstrous shells ripped overhead. The injured man beside the road was trying to stand, but seemed too feeble to rise. “Say that again, Meadows,” Evans demanded.
Lieutenant Meadows consulted his notebook. “‘Look out on your left, you are turned.’ Those are the exact words, sir.”
Evans swiveled fast to stare north, though nothing showed there except the heavy summer trees and a high hawk soaring. Then he turned back to Starbuck, his small eyes wide with shock. “I owe you an apology, boy. By God I owe you an apology. I’m sorry, so I am, sorry!” Evans blurted out the last word, then twisted again, this time to stare toward the stone bridge. His left hand twitched spasmodically at his side, the only evidence of the strain he was enduring. “This is a pretense. They ain’t attacking here, they’re just stroking our bellies, fooling us, keeping us still while the real attack comes up our backsides. Jesus!” He had been speaking to himself, but suddenly he snapped into a much louder voice. “Horse! Bring my horse! Get on your horse, boy!” This last was to Starbuck.
“Sir!” Starbuck yelped.
“Boy?”
“I’m tied up.”
“Release the boy! Otto?”
“Ja, Colonel?”
“Give Boston some barrelito. One cup.” It seemed that Evans had chosen the name “Boston” for Starbuck’s nickname, just as the curious stone barrel on the German orderly’s back was called “barrelito.”
The big German rode his piebald horse close to Starbuck while another man, hurrying to obey Evans’s orders, cut the rope at Starbuck’s wrists. Starbuck began massaging the rope burns, then saw that the impassive German orderly had reached behind his back to manipulate a small wooden tap that was let into the base of the stoneware barrel. The German drew a tin cup of liquid from the barrel, then solemnly handed the cup down to Starbuck. “Trink! Come now, quick! I need the cup again. Trink!”
Starbuck accepted the cup that was filled with what appeared to be cold tea. He was thirsty as a dog and eagerly tipped the cup to his lips, then half choked for the liquid was not tea, but whiskey; raw, hard, undiluted whiskey.
“Trink up!” Otto sounded bad-tempered.
“My horse!” Evans yelled. A shell screamed overhead, thumping into the hill behind. At the very same moment a solid shot struck the wounded man beside the road, killing him instantly and flinging his blood ten feet into the air. Starbuck saw what he thought was the man’s severed leg spinning through the air, then instantly rejected the sight as unreal. Another solid shot cracked into a tree, splitting a three-foot lance of fresh wood from the trunk and showering leaves onto the raggedly torn leg. Then Lieutenant Meadows, who had repeated the wig-wagger’s alarming message, suddenly gulped and widened his eyes. He was staring at Starbuck and his eyes seemed to grow wider and wider as his hand slowly strayed to his throat, where a bead of blood swelled and glistened. His notebook slipped to the ground, its pages fluttering, as the bead of blood grew and split, then suddenly he choked a flood of gore down his tunic’s front. He swayed, gargling blood, then his whole body twitched violently as he slid out of the saddle and onto the grass. “I’ll take Meadows’s horse,” Evans snapped, and grabbed the gray’s reins. The dying man’s foot was caught in the stirrup. Evans jerked it free, then pulled himself up onto the horse’s back.
Starbuck drained the tin cup, gasped for breath, then reached for Pocahontas’s reins. He clambered awkwardly into the saddle, wondering what he was supposed to do now that he was free.
“Boston!” Evans turned his horse toward Starbuck. “Will that bastard Faulconer listen to you?”
“I think so, sir,” Starbuck said, then, more honestly, “I don’t know, sir.”
Evans frowned as a thought came to him. “Why are you fighting for us, Boston? This ain’t your fight.”
Starbuck did not know what to say. His reasons were more to do with his father than with America’s destiny, still more to do with Sally than with slavery, but this did not seem the time or the place to explain such things. “Because I’m a rebel.” He offered the explanation feebly, knowing its inadequacy.
But it pleased Nathan Evans, who had just taken a mug of whiskey from his stern-looking orderly. He drained the mug. “Well, you’re my rebel now, Boston, so find Faulconer and tell him I want his precious Legion. Tell him I’m moving most of my troops to the Sudley Road, and I want his Virginians up there too. Tell him to form on my left.”
Starbuck, dizzied by the whiskey, his change of fortune and by the sense of panic whirling in the humid air, tried to insert a note of caution into Evans’s planning. “Colonel Faulconer was determined to move to the right wing, sir.”
“Damn what Faulconer wants!” Evans screamed so loud that the idling gunners across the turnpike were startled. “Tell Faulconer that the Confederacy needs him! Tell the bastard we have to stop the Yankees or else we’ll all be doing Lincoln’s rope dance tonight! I’m trusting you, boy! Get Faulconer and tell the bastard to fight, damn his eyes! Tell the damp-bellied bastard to fight!” Evans shouted the last words, then savaged his heels back, leaving Starbuck astonished and alone as the staff officers and orderlies streamed after Evans toward the men defending the stone bridge.
Bullets snicked and whimpered in the heavy air. Flies were gathering thick in the ditch to lay their eggs in the gobbets of flesh that had been a man just moments before. Lieutenant Meadows lay on his back with his dead eyes showing surprise and his blood-swilled mouth gaping wide open. Starbuck, the whiskey sour in his belly, gathered the reins, turned Pocahontas’s head, and went to find the Legion.
The Faulconer Legion took its first casualty at around five minutes past eight in the morning. A shell came over the hill to the east, skipped once on the reverse slope, tumbled in the air with a horrid shrieking noise, then struck the ground a second time some twelve yards in front of A Company. The shell exploded there, driving a splinter of jagged iron into the skull of Joe Sparrow, the boy who had a scholarship to the university, but who now died as easy a death as any soldier could wish. One moment he was standing upright, grinning at a joke told by Cyrus Matthews, and the next he was on his back. He twitched once, felt nothing, died.
“Joe?” Cyrus asked.
The other men edged nervously away from the collapsed boy, all but his friend George Waters, who had been standing beside Sparrow in the second rank and who now dropped to his knees beside the body. Sparrow’s cap had been tugged round by the force of the striking shell fragment and George now tried to pull it straight, but as he tugged at the cap’s stiff visor a terrible wash of blood escaped from under the sweatband. “Oh, God!” George Waters recoiled from the horrid sight. “He’s dead!”
“Don’t be a lunkhead, boy. Skulls bleed like stuck pigs, you know that.” Sergeant Howes had pushed through the ranks and now knelt beside Sparrow. “Come on, Runt, wake up!” He pulled the cap straight, trying to hide the blood, then slapped the dead boy lightly on the cheek. This was Blanche and Frank Sparrow’s only boy, the pride of their lives. Blanche had tried real hard to persuade the boy not to march to war, but someone had left a scornful petticoat on their front porch, addressed to Joe, and young Joe had wanted to join the Legion anyways and so Blanche had relented, but now Joe was flat on his back in a field.
“Call the doctor! The doctor!” Paul Hinton, captain of
A Company, slid out of his saddle and shouted the order.
Major Danson came running with his medical bag from the rear of the regiment where the band was playing “Annie Laurie,” the sax-horn tubas embroidering a clever bass line in counterpoint to the plangent melody that was so popular with the men. Danson pushed through the ranks of A Company. “Give him air!” he shouted, which is what he usually shouted whenever he was called to a sick person. Invariably the field hands or the servants or the family members all crowded about the patient, and Danson could not stand working amidst a throng of onlookers all offering suggestions. If they were so knowledgeable, he often wondered, why did they need him? “Stand back, now. Who is it, Dan?”
“Blanche Sparrow’s boy, Doc,” Hinton said.
“Not young Joe! Now come on, Joe, you’ll be missing all the fun!” Doctor Danson dropped to his knees. “What’s the matter, now? Got hit on the head, did you?”
“He’s dead.” George Waters had gone white with shock.
Major Danson frowned at this amateur diagnosis, then felt for Joseph Sparrow’s pulse. He said nothing for a few seconds, then lifted off the blood-stained forage cap to reveal Joe’s hair all soaked and matted red. “Oh, poor Blanche,” the doctor said softly, “what are we to tell her?” He unbuttoned the collar of the dead boy’s tunic as if to give him air.
Another ricocheted shell whipsawed overhead and crashed to earth a half mile beyond the regiment, its explosion lost in the dense foliage of a stand of trees. Adam Faulconer, who had been standing his horse on the hillcrest to watch the cannonade ripple smoke and flame about the distant stream, now realized something was amiss within the Legion’s ranks and spurred back to the regiment. “What’s happened?” he asked Doctor Danson.
“It’s Blanche’s boy, young Joe.”
“Oh, God, no.” There was an awful pain in Adam’s voice. The day was already bringing Adam the violence he had feared, and yet, he suspected, the battle had not really begun. The two sides had made contact and were hurling shells at each other, but neither seemed to have launched a real assault.
“Blanche will never live with this,” Danson said, struggling to his feet. “I remember when Joe nearly died of the whooping cough and I thought she’d go with him to his grave. Dear God, what a terrible thing.” Around him a ring of soldiers stared aghast at the dead boy. It was not that death was so strange to any of them; all had seen sisters or brothers or cousins or parents laid out in the parlor, and all had helped carry a casket into the church or had helped pull a drowned body from the river, but this was different; this was chance death, war’s lottery, and it could just as easily have been themselves lying there all bloody and still. This was something they were not really prepared for, because nothing in their training had convinced them that young men ended up open mouthed, flat on their backs, fly blown, bloodied and dead.
“Carry him to the back, lads,” Captain Hinton now said. “Lift him up! Careful now!” Hinton supervised the removal of the body, then walked back to Adam. “Where’s your father, Adam?”
“I don’t know.”
“He should be here.” Hinton gathered his horse’s reins and hauled himself laboriously into the saddle.
“I suppose the general’s keeping him,” Adam suggested lamely. There was a glistening patch of blood beside Joe Sparrow’s fallen cap on the grass. “Poor Blanche,” Adam said. “We took Joe out of the color party because we reckoned he’d be safer in the ranks.”
But Hinton was not listening. Instead he was frowning eastward to where a horseman had appeared on the brow of the hill. “Is that Starbuck? It is, by God!”
Adam turned and, to his astonishment, saw that it was indeed Starbuck who was galloping toward the Legion and, for a second, Adam thought he must be seeing ghosts, then he saw that it really was his friend who, not three hours before, had been dispatched back north to his own people, but who had now returned coatless, pale, hurried, and urgent. “Where’s your father?” Starbuck shouted.
“I don’t know, Nate.” Adam had ridden to meet his friend. “What are you doing here?”
“Where’s Pecker?” Starbuck’s voice was curt, ungiving, out of tune with the melancholy mood of Sparrow’s death.
“What are you doing here, Nate?” Adam asked again, spurring his horse after Starbuck. “Nate?”
But Starbuck had already kicked his horse down the front of the Legion to where Major Bird stood beneath the Legion’s colors that hung limp in the windless air.
“Sir!” Starbuck reined in close to Bird.
Bird blinked up at the horseman. “Starbuck? I was told to discharge you! Are you certain you’re meant to be here?”
“Sir.” Nathaniel Starbuck sounded stilted and formal. “Colonel Evans sent me, sir. He wants us to advance on the Sudley Road. The enemy has crossed the stream by Sudley Church, and are marching this way.”
Pecker Bird blinked up at the young man and noted that Starbuck had sounded remarkably calm, which calmness, he supposed, was a perverse symptom of the boy’s excitement, and then Bird thought how astonishingly well everyone was playing their soldierly parts on this unlikely morning. “Aren’t those orders more properly addressed to Colonel Faulconer?” Bird heard himself asking, and was amazed that his natural inclination was so to avoid taking the responsibility.
“If I could find the Colonel, sir, I’d tell him. But I don’t think there’s time, and if we don’t move, sir, there won’t be anything left of this army.”
“Is that so?” Bird also sounded calm, but his hands were clawing through his beard with the stress of the moment. He opened his mouth to speak again, but no sound came. He was thinking that he too would have to play a soldierly part, now that fate had dropped this responsibility into his lap, and then he pusillanimously thought that a soldier’s duty was to obey and Colonel Faulconer’s orders had been very specific: that he was to ignore any instructions from Colonel Nathan Evans. Faulconer was even now attempting to have the Legion deployed southward to where Beauregard expected the main battle to be fought, but Colonel Nathan Evans wanted the Legion to march northward and was evidently claiming that the Confederacy’s entire future depended on Bird’s obedience.
“Sir!” Starbuck was evidently not so calm as he seemed for he was pressing Major Bird for a decision.
Bird waved Starbuck to silence. Thaddeus Bird’s first impulse had been to avoid all responsibility by blindly obeying Washington Faulconer’s instructions, but that very impulse allowed Bird to understand just why his brother-in-law had given in to Miriam’s entreaties and appointed him as a major. It was because Washington Faulconer believed that Bird would never dare disobey him. The Colonel evidently dismissed Bird as a safe nonentity who would never detract from his glory. In fact, as Thaddeus Bird suddenly realized, no one was allowed to compete with Washington Faulconer, which was why the Colonel surrounded himself with dullards like Ridley, and why, when a man like Starbuck threatened to show some independence, he was so quickly ejected from the Colonel’s entourage. Even Adam’s scruples were acceptable to Washington Faulconer because they prevented Adam from rivaling his father. Washington Faulconer would surround himself with dull men just so that he could shine all the brighter, and as Thaddeus Bird understood that truth, so he was determined to thwart it. Damn Faulconer, because Major Thaddeus Bird would not be dismissed as a nonentity! “Sergeant Major Proctor!”
“Sir!” The dignified sergeant major marched stiffly from his place behind the color party.
“The Legion will advance on the crossroads at the foot of the hill, Sergeant Major, in columns of company. Then up the farther road,” Bird pointed across the valley. “Give the orders, if you please.”
The sergeant major, who knew exactly how much authority Major Bird was supposed to exercise in the Faulconer Legion, drew himself to his full and impressive height. “Are those the Colonel’s orders, Major, sir?”
“They are the orders of your superior officer, Sergeant Major Proctor.” Now that Bird had ma
de up his mind he seemed to be enjoying himself, for his head was nodding back and forth and his thin mouth was twisted into a sardonic grin. “We shall advance along the Sudley Road, which is that dirt road beyond the crossroads.” Bird pointed northward again, then looked at Starbuck for confirmation. “Is that right?”
“Yes, sir. And Colonel Evans requests that we form up on his left when we cross the farther hill.” Starbuck guessed that was the exact place where Washington Faulconer had said farewell to him.
“Would it not be better, sir…,” Sergeant Major Proctor said, attempting to subdue Pecker Bird’s lunacy.
“Do it!” Bird screamed in sudden rage. “Do it!”
Adam Faulconer had followed Starbuck to Major Bird’s side and now intervened to calm things down. “What are you doing, Uncle?”
“The Legion will advance in column of companies!” Major Bird snapped in a surprisingly loud voice. “Company A will advance first! Companies! ’Shun!”
A very few men shuffled to attention, but most just stayed on the ground, supposing that Pecker had fallen off his perch as he had used to do in the schoolroom after he had been teased or otherwise goaded into a fury. Many of the Legion’s officers were having difficulty in suppressing their laughter and some, like Ridley, were jerking their heads back and forth like feeding birds.
“Nate.” Adam turned to his friend. “Will you please explain exactly what’s happening?”
“The enemy has got round our rear,” Nate explained loudly enough for the nearest companies to hear, “and Colonel Evans needs this regiment to help head off their attack. There’s no one but us and Colonel Evans’s men who can stop them, and if we don’t move, the day’s lost.”
“Like shit.” That was Ethan Ridley. “You’re a goddamned Yankee and you’re doing a Yankee’s work. There’s no enemy over there.”
Adam put a hand on Starbuck’s arm to restrain him. Then he stared north across the turnpike. Nothing moved there. Not even a leaf stirred. The landscape was heavy, somnolent, empty.